My first husband was in the ROTC in college. After his graduation we went to El Paso to live while he attended officers’ school. My little girl took her first steps there. We lived in a small housing complex with other young families. I became friend with another of the mothers in her twenties. She was from Oklahoma. One of the first things I noticed about her was that living in that hot, dry climate had scored deep frown and squint wrinkles in her youthful skin. Seeing them I determined right then that if I was going to have wrinkles at least they would be pleasant ones, and so I trained myself to notice whenever I started to squint or frown. Then as I caught myself, I would stop.

Some research on the Internet revealed that it takes more muscles for a genuine smile than it does for a frown. Furthermore, the act of smiling exercises the facial muscles and brings more blood to nourish the cells of the face. This I turn helps make us look younger and prettier. More important, so far as I m concerned is that the act of smiling releases endorphins in the brain. These are feel good hormones that makes us feel happier. So as we do so, we smile more and so forth. This is called a positive feedback loop.

This morning, I intuitively chose a talisman to wear, without knowing why it was the right one for the day ahead. A while back, I’d made the talisman out of Angora fibers (otherwise known as rabbit fur), Cormo, which is one of the softest wools in existence, some other fibers, and two glass beads. (In case it's hard to see in the photo: the three center beads are ones I made out of fibers, and on each side of them is a glass bead. If memory serves, I spun the cord entirely out of bunny fur.)

Later today, while on my physical therapy walk through the woods, I meditated on what the talisman had for me today. The first thing that came to me was the gentleness of rabbits.

So like everything we discuss, you don't have to be a girl to get a girl. We're gonna get real meta here and go a step further: your girl doesn't even have to be a girl. But you need a girl. She won't be one person, this isn't Downton Abbey. She'll be more like a team of girls - your Sephora girl (mine is Alex), your hair girl (mine is Justine), a cosmetics girl when you have to have your situation in order (mine is Michelle), your yoga girl (mine is Jennifer), your girl for seamstress issues (I'm in between currently, but they generally do your dry cleaning too), your girl for cobbling issues (mine is a dude), your girl for your diet issues (mine is Sarah) and so on and so forth. You need a team of experts who you can go to and whine that you don't know how to use highlighter/don't know how red your hair should be/slap fake eyelashes on you/fix your inherited Manolos when you wore them places where they don't belong/get your Warrior pose correct/engage in psychological warfare with when you are not magically six weeks in because you are being half assed because it is rosé season. Get a team established. It sounds terrifying and expensive but it really isn't once you get in there. Most of these things ultimately save you money and aren't a high upfront cost. You could keep buying red lipsticks at the drug store on sale at $8 a pop and not getting it right, or you could ask a girl and spend $18 and not need to buy three you will never wear again. Three = $24. One = $18.

But we all have problems that are more minor than even the above but we still somehow haven't found the solution to. This is when you enlist a (cyber) girl. There are many bloggers whose whole joie de vivre is to come up with solutions to these problems and then go forth and share them with the masses through Pinterest. They are often (though not always) Hipster Mormon Mommy bloggers who are generally living the (caffeine-free) Instagram dream. All you have to do is type in what you need in the oracular search bar and a whole huge canvas of solutions will appear before your very eyes. If that's not actual witchcraft, I frankly do not know what is.